I don’t want this to turn into a Pit thread but, nyctea, I’ve seen you get a little bent out of shape about gender issues more than once. I am suprised that you are asking specifically about men rather than people in general.
I am far neater than my ex-wife. Now that she is gone, the house is much neater. Granted there is one less person living there but the neatness is because her fucking clutter isn’t strewn all over the place anymore. The living room used to be a mine field of shoes, bags from her clothing shopping (different rant), papers, exercise equipment, empty glasses and other various things. We didn’t have kids so it’s not like there wasn’t any free time. How hard is it to spend five minutes picking up the stuff from the day before you go to sleep?
My dad likes it when I come to stay because I don’t make a mess… my sister turns the house into a trash heap within minutes of arriving. And her car… oh my god.
It’s the other way around in my house. I need the kitchen clean before I do any cooking, and the bathrooms should not be grubby. Other than that, I really don’t care all that much about dust and clutter. This is the major bone of contention between my husband and me in the 40+ years of our marriage. The problem is, he came from an environment where cleanliness was extraordinarily important AND was taken care of by his mother, as was all the cooking.
Before we have any important company over, there will be a cleaning and straightening frenzy, accompanied by much stress.
You may be on to something here. There’s a theory that, back in our hunter-gatherer days, gathering (which was the women’s activity) required a much better eye for detail than hunting. And so women evolved to have a better eye for detail than men, and it persists to this day. It’s not obviously implausible.
I dunno – from my experience with Mr. Kiz (which happens to mirror most of the female commenters here), I’d wager to say that it yes, a lot of it probably stems from not noticing/caring, but also the passive-aggressive I’m-still-in-my-teens rebellious phase that so many men seem to possess. Why, I have no idea. I’m still trying to figure it out.
Before Mr. Kiz, most of the men I dated were sloppy. I didn’t live with them, so I felt it wasn’t any of my business to comment.
The two who weren’t? One was ex-military. Lots of stuff, yes, but everything was arranged so neatly and at attention that at first glance you wouldn’t notice.
The second was more of an OCD freak than my MIL. Come to think of it, that just may be the reason why Mr. Kiz rebels so much against anything to do with cleaning. Hmm.
Both my fiance and I are total slobs. I’m going to clean today, but I’m not happy about it.
We have two things that have to be done, laundry and dishes. I’m in charge of laundry, he’s in charge of dishes/kitchen cleaning.
We’re pretty okay living like slobs (lots of paper trash in our house, but we clean up food as to not draw bugs) and living in clutter. We’re going to have to start showing our apartment, though, as we’re not renewing this year, so we have to pick up and keep the place picked up for the next few months.
Female slob, here. Not cleaning is easier than cleaning. Easy.
I think a much better question would be why more women aren’t slobs. I mean, people have to choose to be bothered by, say, floors that haven’t been vacuumed or sheets that haven’t been changed in a while. These things aren’t inherently bothersome, and in fact you can’t really tell the difference unless you happen to know when these tasks were last done. Why not choose not to be bothered by it and make your life simpler?
I rarely clean because I simply don’t have much free time. I’ve been working lots of overtime lately, and when I get home I have time to eat, surf the Dope, play a bit of World of Warcraft, then sleep. That’s about it.
On Sundays, the only day I haven’t been working lately, I do laundry and dishes. I will occassionally vacuum or do minor tidying. But I don’t want to spend my one day off for the week just cleaning.
I wonder if at least some of the stereotype of the slobbish man comes from the fact that men were (and probably still are) more likely to work full-time. I don’t have a cite, but I recall hearing somewhere that although most women work, they are much more likely to work part-time than men. And if one person spends more time at home than the other, then they will naturally notice grime and dirt easier. Not only that, they probably won’t be as tired as the full-time worker. I also suspect that men are far more likely to do physically demanding jobs, leaving them exhausted and uninterested in anything other than being a couch potato.
(This is just a hypothesis. I could, of course, be wrong.)
Seconded. Wasn’t there just a thread in here a week or so ago asking the same thing? IIRC, a lot of people commented that the OP was wrong for assuming the stereotype that men are messy is correct. I also seem to remember that most people posting to that thread said that the guys in the relationships tended to be neater.
Funny how I found this thread after I spent one hour last night taking apart a vacuum that had a stuck spindle and removed about half a headful of my wife’s hair that’s wrapped around it to make it work again…and the dust bunnies.
Generally, the nesting trait is primarily a woman’s characteristic, and is more of an important issue to her rather than a man’s issue. That’s why most men don’t see a dirtier room as much of a nuisance to them as most women would.
I do like to take preventative steps though when it comes to keeping a house clean so I don’t have to clean it as often, but my wife (who has been nicknamed “Spiller Diller” since childhood) and my 3 sons make my dream an impossibility.
If that’s true then why do women apparently lack the ability to notice the detail of the position of the toilet seat?
I willing to bet he(like most clothes droppers) knows exactly were the shirt containment area is instinctively and has never trod upon anything there, even in the dark.
I’m a guy in my early 40’s. I’ve never been in the military. I clean my place once or twice a week. At least one of those times requires disinfecting all non carpeted floors and all counter surfaces. Toilets get cleaned the most frequently with an additional random wipe down with a bit or Tylex.
When I was living with my ex-wife (15 years) we both kept a pretty clean and orderly household. I was clean before that and I’m equally clean now. Bed sheets are changed once a week. Dishes never sit in the sink more than an hour or so.
Every woman I’ve dated since, doesn’t seem to be as thorough as me when it comes to being house proud.
My younger bother is the same as me and we got our cleanliness habits from our parents.
I guess it’s not a question of not having something better to do instead of cleaning. I seem to get everything I want to do done in any given day. But the cleaning has it’s time and priority and it also gets done. I just feel/breath better in a clean and tidy home.
I was using the Dear Amy letter as a springboard: She asked:
“How can so many women have the same complaints?”
Then I asked for your opinions:
"My question for you, Dopers, is this: do you really think many/most men are like this? "
I know plenty of messy/dirty women too. But it seems men have a bigger reputation for not liking to clean. I’m wondering if this is really true, and if so, why? In my experience, it’s men who are the worst. I’m just asking for other opinions.
And to be fair, I did ask:
“And on the flip side… Men, what things do women do that bug you similarly?”
Leave clean, folded laundry over any and every flat surface, anywhere in the house, rather than put the fucking stuff away. Leave clean laundry in the ironing basket indefinitely, rather than iron it and put the fucking stuff away. (On the plus side, the cat finds it very comfortable. We have taken to putting a towel on top of the ironing basket so the cat will not get the clean laundry all covered in cat hairs.) Treat the stovetop as an extension of the work surfaces - mercifully not for laundry, but the odd melted plastic item over the years has still not persuaded Mrs M that sometimes the fucking thing is hot, and one of these days we’re cruising for a paper fire. Leave her dirty clothes all over the bedroom floor. And leave her used sanpro in the open basket in the en-suite until her period’s over or the basket is full to the brim. At least it gets folded up in its inherent wrapping, though if the little sticky tab doesn’t stick, well, that’s Kismet. (The basket gets emptied if the lady-who-does is coming; after all, we wouldn’t want Linda to have to put up with that, would we? :rolleyes: )
This made me laugh:
You mean, like some women passively-aggressively set you up to hit them, so they can then make you be the “bad man”? :dubious: (NB - I have never hit Mrs M; I think I may have shouted at her twice in a dozen years of marriage.)
You just finish the last morsel of a large, sumptuous meal (virtually still chewing) when the women leap up and start fussing about taking dirty plates back to the kitchen.
I protest.
They insist, “No, you’ll be thankful in the morning if we do it now.”
No I won’t. I accept that waking up to a filthy kitchen is not going to be a great start to the morning, but I’m willing to make that trade-off. In the morning, I’ll be alert and fresh, and will be able to knock it over in five minutes. But for now, I’m tired and probably had a beer or two, I’m bloated with rich food and dessert, and I would like nothing more than to remain at the table with everybody for another twenty minutes or so to digest the food, maybe have a coffee or another glass of wine, a bit of conversation, etc.
I’m currently at college, where people generally have a room to themselves, either in halls or rented housing. I was really surprised to find that the whole “woman are neater” thing doesn’t hold at all. On the whole, it seems to balance out – though I’m sure I’ve come across more obsessively neat guys (the sort who cringe if you nudge their pen pot out of place), while the messiest room I’ve ever seen belonged to a girl (clothes, empty wrappers and course material jumbled up all over the floor).
I bought brandy glasses and a bottle of brandy in a vain effort to get my husband to stay at the table for, eesh, maybe five minutes after we finish our meal so we can sit like civilised people before he jumps up and starts scraping off the dishes and loading the dishwasher.
I can see him twitching the whole time I make him wait.
Okay, it’s my house. Not his. He spends a lot of nights over with me, and a lot of time, but it isn’t his house and he doesn’t have any cleaning responsibilities. Plus, I myself tend to slobbitude.
So why the fuck, since he’s basically sleeping and showering rent free, does he knock half the fucking shower curtain off the rod any time he even walks near the bathroom, and then not put it back up? I realize, yeah, it’s a pain in the ass - it falls down a lot because the rod is too low because it’s a crappy bathroom. But I don’t knock it down, and if I did I’d put the little hooks back up! What the hell is so hard about that? And don’t you think there’s a reason I have the curtain clipped to the wall in front? That it might have something to do with huge puddles of water on the floor? And that if you just absolutely have to drag it out of it’s clip, you could put it back?!
Also, if I make a nice dinner, and we eat it, the last stop for your dish is not the sink, with food still on it. Particularly if I yell after you, “The dishes in the dishwasher are dirty!” I don’t ask him to clean the kitchen, or wash the dishes, or anything. Wouldn’t you just automatically rinse? Since it isn’t your house?
Also, with the damned bread. Leave it open, get stale bread. See if I buy more.
I had no idea I had so much hostility built up over the shower curtain.
We’re pretty clean (ie no food waste lying around), but not at all tidy.
I’m bothered by clutter, though, once:
I can’t find stuff I need
there’s no place to sit or walk without stepping or sitting on something
As my husband is the more likely one to lose stuff, and to carelessly sit/step on things (which then break), I am usually the one to pick up and he is the one to not notice.
I’m also bothered when I walk around barefoot and bits of particulate matter stick to my feet, and I am also badly allergic to dust - hence I vacuum a lot, even though my place is hardwood. No dusting for me, just a zap with the Shark Plus and it’s all good. I’d bet that at least half the time I pick stuff up off the floor it’s so that I can vacuum underneath it.
I sometimes get rather grouchy and intolerable if I spend my Saturday cleaning up two weeks’ worth of house clutter while he is not, and he has learned that it’s much better for him if he helps out a little when he sees me cleaning up his mess around him.
Re: nagging, and the passive-aggressive way to bring this about - I once had a (male) roommate who would never, ever do the minor chores that he had agreed to when we moved in together (i.e. sweep the living room and stairs occasionally, wash your own dishes - a pretty good deal considering he never had to clean the kitchen/bathroom). He never did it, literally, never in about six months. I asked him to do it, and he said he would, but wouldn’t tell me when - he’d say “I’ll do it, don’t worry.” If I reminded him he’d get mad that I was nagging, and refuse to do it because I had nagged him.
Pretty good deal for him, I’d say. I pity the poor woman he marries - if any one of us is stupid enough to take him.
